The Benefits of Kids Yoga…Classes Now Offered at Journey into the Soul Wellness Center!

Yoga is a holistic practice that is meant bring peace and centeredness, strengthen and align one’s body, as well as improve mobility and increase confidence. All of these benefits and more are available to those who practice yoga. Typically adults are self aware and realize that yoga is a great addition to their busy lives. However, we tend to forget the pressures that are put on our children as well. Yoga for kids is an effective way to offer these benefits to our children.

Our children live in a hurry-up world of busy parents, school pressures, incessant lessons, video games, social media, and competitive sports. We usually don’t think of these influences as stressful for our kids, but often they are. The bustling pace of our children’s lives can have a profound effect on their innate joy—and usually not for the better.

Yoga can help counter these pressures. When children learn techniques for self-health, relaxation, and inner fulfillment, they can navigate life’s challenges with a little more ease. Yoga at an early age encourages self-esteem and body awareness with a physical activity that’s noncompetitive. It also gives children coping strategies when they feel stressed or frustrated.
Yoga for Kids encourages that marvelous inner light that all children have to the surface. Yoga for children is quite different than yoga for adults. Children derive enormous benefits from yoga. Physically, it enhances their flexibility, strength, coordination, and body awareness. In addition, their concentration and sense of calmness and relaxation improves. Doing yoga, children exercise, play, connect more deeply with the inner self, and develop an intimate relationship with the natural world that surrounds them.
The greatest challenge with children is to hold their attention long enough to teach them the benefits of yoga: stillness, balance, flexibility, focus, peace, grace, connection, health, and well-being. Luckily, most children love to talk, and they love to move—both of which can happen in yoga. Children will jump at the chance to assume the role of animals, trees, flowers, warriors. Our role is to step back and allow them to bark in the Dog Pose, hiss in the cobra, and meow in cat stretch. Sound is a great release for children and adds an auditory dimension to the physical experience of yoga.Yoga for Kids integrates storytelling, games, music, language, and other arts into a complete curriculum that engages the “whole child.”
Most of all, yoga engages the entire mind, body, and spirit in a way that honors all the ways children learn. Yoga poses are a springboard for exploration of many other areas—animal adaptations and behavior, music and playing instruments, storytelling, and drawing. These practices offer many possibilities to exchange wisdom, share good times, and lay the foundation for a lifelong practice that will continue to deepen.

Journey into the Soul Wellness Center will be offering kids yoga on these dates: